My daughter is one of the most open and welcoming people I’ve ever known. She simply loves people. I’ve never seen a little girl so open to others. I can’t even sum it up with “friendly” – it’s almost beyond friendly. She seems to just love everyone she meets. Anne is so quick to hug, to kiss, to say “hi!” and “how you?”. She wants to play with every little kid she meets. She wants to chat with everyone. It hurts my heart when I see people turn her away or ignore her or when little kids take their toys away from her. I just don’t want her to know that not everyone is going to love her. I want, somehow, to preserve this inherently Godly characteristic she displays of just loving people. I don’t want it stolen from her. I don’t want it tempered. I don’t even want it thwarted. I simply love how she is so completely in the moment and so open to others, no matter what they look like, smell like, act like, how old they are.
I always joke around that it’s that “Brian side” in her coming out. He’s so charismatic and welcoming, she just picks up on it. “She’s her Daddy’s girl!” I’ll crow. But I’ve been wondering lately if that’s the case. My parents told me that it reminds them of me. They just can’t get over how much Anne is like me, they say. Then when I express disbelief that I was ever that open, ever that loving to everyone, they quickly respond with many, many stories of me in my early childhood years, demonstrating this very nature, of kids that everyone else hated that I played with or times I gave away everything I had. It made me stop and realise that they are right. I was like that. I was hurt a bit by relationships, as most people are, nothing serious but enough that by junior high you don’t trust people much anymore. You learn to keep your core hidden. You learn to protect and self-preserve. I somehow have tricked myself into believing that this – this learned behaviour – was more “me” than my childhood self. This learned behaviour of being closed or protective, not trusting others, seemed normal.
I wrote a post a little over a week ago about how I’ve been experiencing a “personal Pentecost” in my life these past few years. And this is another one of those. I have felt God removing those layers of learned behaviour, stripping away any hardness in my heart, any unforgiveness no matter how trite, any bitterness being dealt with. And in its place, I sometimes feel like I have a whole new heart. I sometimes feel like I am feeling things I hadn’t felt in a few years or didn’t allow myself to do. It’s like a restoration project.
I am finding out how much I simply love people. I have such great tenderness in my heart for others. I want them to feel the welcome of God through me. I want to be the one that embraces them. Sometimes it’s disconcerting for me to realise that people I just work with or meet or even just hear about on the news can affect me so much. I feel …I don’t know…like I just love them. I yearn for others to know the Father heart of God. I want to be Jesus’ hands and feet for them. I love the people I work with. They are so different from me and yet I really love them. I love to listen to them, love to hear about their lives, love to hang out. I love my family. I have renewed love for my extended family like my cousins. I even made my peace with a lot of people/memories from high school, reaching out and having relationships restored. It’s been a crazy few years for me; I am so much more tender in my heart. I have a hard time walking past the needy now. I have a hard time brushing people off. I have a hard time with my own cynicism at times, my own criticalness. I sometimes feel a little raw, like I’m always on the edge of just bursting into tears with love.
For instance, there is a tragic story out of Merritt right now. A 10 year old girl and her two brothers (ages 8 and 5) were stabbed to death by their father. He is on the run right now in the back country of BC, still unfound. I just see pictures of these three babies and I cry. I can’t imagine what they have endured. I think the thing that makes it a bit harder is that it seems like the media is whitewashing it a bit. They were home alone. They lived in a run down area of the city, in a low income trailer. They were new to town, their mother evidently moved them all up there to get away from the dad. On the day after this happened, the local news station interviewed a little girl that was in the class with the murdered girl. She said that this little family didn’t have any friends. No one would be friends with these kids because they “didn’t smell good and they wore weird clothes” plus she said “they hardly ever took a bath”. She said she felt bad that she wasn’t friends with her because she “thought that Katelyn might have been really lonely. And maybe if I was her friend, she would have been at my house.” Ever since then, there’s been a steady parade of parents on camera, talking about their sorrow over these children, no one ever again mentioning how lonely they were, how friendless and avoided. Maybe they don’t want to admit what kind of a life these children had, the trajectory of tragedy that they were on. I think of these little children, every day going to a school where they had no friends. And then to die in such a gruesome manner at the hands of their own father. I am sick to my stomach. I can’t stop praying for them and for their parents. I can’t stop wanting to find every dirty little kid and just hug them tight.
I wonder sometimes if I will have the eyes to see these children around our kids, to open our home to the smelly kid with weird parents, to express love to the unloveable.
I think it matters so much to me because it reminds me somehow of my mother. She had a difficult childhood and often refers to herself as “that dirty little kid” that didn’t get a shower or a bath or a toothbrush. It hurts my heart to think of my mother in these places and stories that she’s told me – I can’t even fathom it. I see her, in a snowstorm, crying with cold because her jacket is two sizes too small with a long road to walk home. And I simply ache. I didn’t really understand her until she told me more about her life. And then I had a compulsion to know her. To truly know where she came from and what molded her and shaped her. I wanted to know her beautiful stories, yes, but also these things that she had forgiven and released to Jesus. Most people would never know this about her. She is so whole and healthy, so beautiful, so full of life and love, that they can’t even fathom the places she has walked.
My mother has such deep wells of compassion in her. She always hugged the dirty kids that were in my class growing up. She was quick to love people. She made friends with people that embarrassed me as a teenager – their teeth missing, their odd smell, their filthy homes – why couldn’t she have “normal” friends, I fretted. She just seemed to be okay with “the least of these” and I never understood it until now. She just loved them. Whether it was her past or her new life in Jesus or a combination of both, she just loved. She almost seemed to carry an air of innocence about her, like my daughter has, a wide openness to the world.
The older I get the more I see how holy that is. I used to not understand it, maybe because i had tried to train that very tendency out of my own self. But now I see it as the greatest thing I could have in my life. It’s not easy and you are more open to hurt, more open to disappointment, more raw. But I think – I think – I’d rather go through life a little wounded than in a fortress, I’d rather be hurt or disappointed or have to forgive than never take the risk. I’d rather cry when I watch the news than turn away, unmoved.
In a way, it’s like Jesus is bringing me back to myself. Peeling off the layers of hardness, the ‘self-preservation’, the cynicism, the bitterness and making me open to people with my daughter and my mother as an example ever before me.
